Our view of the world, ourselves and others determine our purpose in life and shapes our search for happiness. These views which we hold can often result in the clash of ideas. When our hopes or aspirations bump up against other peoples’ wills and desires, when we are forced to contend with the limitations of our natural environment and its’ resources, and then, when we experience the fact that material consumption cannot buy us happiness, we experience conflict.

We’re all aware of how political differences, or differences in social philosophies, lead to clashes of ideas, but I’m not dealing with those clashes here. I want to try and take a larger view, a more macro perspective of the conflict of larger ideas, something which is frequently overlooked in the heat of political or social debate.

For example, the world is madly in pursuit of economic development. As a society we place no upper limitations on this pursuit – “I want to be as rich as I possibly can be.” This desire contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited. But we fail to see the inherent conflict in this clash of ideas, or if we do, we quickly discard the concern and push on with “making money”.

Yet the consequences of pursuing unlimited economic growth cannot end in anything less than an utter catastrophe for our planet and its’ inhabitants. But why doesn’t the recognition of this danger, even if the recognition is fleeting, incite me to action? Because – to put it mildly, I’ve lost the plot. I am so invested in the philosophy of materialism I don’t really accept I have any other choice than to move with the herd.

The degree to which we have been brain-washed is not even obvious to us. People are mostly oblivious to the reality that what I consider as my ideas, my desires, my values – are not really my own. I did not form them alone. They were often influenced, if not shaped, by others – and I have often uncritically accepted these ideas as factual. Our shift from a “needs based” society to a “desires based” culture, which was the result of focused social engineering in the late 1920’s, is proof of this fact.

If we are to find solutions to what ails us and much of modern civilization, it requires we understand exactly where we are now and how we got here.